


They Call the Wind Mariah

by goodnightfern



Series: 2017 Supply Drops [7]
Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Alaska, Gen, Implied Past Canon Relationships, Other, Ruminating in the Wilderness, Secret Implied Ocekaz, Spring 2000, huskies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 14:34:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12559536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodnightfern/pseuds/goodnightfern
Summary: The locals say it'll be a long summer, and Kaz is gonna be ready for it.For wish 79: "Old bitter Master Miller brooding alone in his cabin in the very early spring. S++ rank if his dogs are mentioned at least once."





	They Call the Wind Mariah

**Author's Note:**

  * For [9755132](https://archiveofourown.org/users/9755132/gifts).



Kaz emerges from the woods dusting pine needles from his shoulders. The traps were empty this morning. Maintaining steady lines of steel body traps is different than tying the odd survival paracord snare. Always more to learn out here. Maybe some of his tripwires and gas bombs are interfering with the usual paths the animals take in the woods around here. He should have thought of that.

The meadow has softened as the morning warms. Mud clings to his boots as he tromps across the field, towards the one-room cabin. The morning fire has burnt to coals, but the coffee will still be warm.

It’s nearly spring and Kaz has his work cut out for him. This morning is the first he’s seen green on the ground in months. He crouches to crumble soil between his gloved fingers.

The ground isn’t quite workable yet. Soon, though. He’ll have cold-weather crops: potatoes, leeks, turnips, cabbage and celery. The locals say gardening isn’t easy here, but it can be done. Cold frames will help extend the season. Maybe he'll try for tomatoes.

The locals say winter is finally ending and Kaz trusts them to know. He thought he knew cold, but it’s nothing like how it is here. The winter was miserable, sitting in a stuffy cabin eating nothing but beans and tinned herring. Bundling up to trek out with the dogs for the constant chore of gathering wood. The sun long forgotten.

The locals spend the entire year getting ready for winter. Kaz’s cabin was ready in October, he hauled out the day after Christmas, but there’s a difference between all those weeks of training in the alpine woods down south and actually taking the step for real. No warm office to return to, no mess hall to cook in. He might hit up a few of the towns for supplies still, but that's all in preparation for when he really goes off the grid.

It’s been all right, though. And next winter will be better. He likes how the cold fills his veins. The winds that white out all sound. Endless nights are shifting to endless day.

Ocelot was the one who taught him how to survive subzero temperatures. Long time ago. He’d said he had no plans of freezing his balls off in the future, Ocelot said his tiny cock would retract completely into his body, something about a pencil-dick icicle, something about - Kaz forgets. Just another go around the block.

But he’d learned.

Even the bionic needs to be fully protected from the cold - moisture will freeze up the joints. Locked him up once, when he’d taken some of the recruits out on a camping trip, and that was only Washington.

A horned owl swoops across the meadow to the stands of trees, a field mouse caught in its claws. There’s a mating pair that’s taken up nest nearby. Kaz calls for the dogs, the wind carrying his voice across the meadow.

Loko and Jody are retired, too. The locals say he needs more huskies, young ones if he wants to start sledding. They speak romantically of the working dog, the relationship between musher and dog. His nearest neighbor - a good thirty miles away - has taken him out before. Showed him how to tend to their paws after a long run.

The locals here are helpful. They never ask questions.

For now Kaz only has the 4x4 for transport. He doesn’t have a kennel yet, anyways. He gives the two dogs their breakfast and scratches behind their ears. They’re good dogs. All husky, not a trace of wolf. Age has slowed them down, but they still have plenty of energy.

Before heading into town Kaz checks his stores. Flour, kerosene, oil. The materials list for the coldframes is pinned to the timbers by the door. Kaz keeps forgetting it. He doesn’t today.

He loads the dogs into the cab and drives down the packed trail. Through the pines to the main road. The sun is high enough now to have melted the ice. Left the road slushy.

They say summer will be humid and sticky. Insects will swarm in clouds, and the mosquitoes will be relentless. That he’s prepared for. The locals have no idea was it was like in the jungle.

Long drapes of mosquito netting. The damp that never left his skin no matter how much he toweled - the towel was wet, too. So sweaty and covered in bites he couldn’t even let Snake touch him. And the roads, god. Half-washed out muddy tracks carved into mountains. A single mudslide could kill you.

Here they have avalanches.

Loko licks his ear. He grins, shoves her away. They’re already halfway to town but the dogs get antsy on long car rides.

The hardware store is all decked out for spring. He parks and rolls down the windows for the dogs so they can stick their heads out and bark at passerby. He’s still iffy on dog etiquette here, and he isn’t a musher yet.

It’s crowded, which isn’t saying much. His neighbor is buying coils of rope. She nods. Kaz nods back.

She’s nice. Antisocial like everyone else, but nice. Stocky and brown-haired and weather beaten. A real mountain woman who can chop wood for hours. There’s a steady kind of strength in the people here. Resilient and gentle.

Kaz thinks of a hand cradling a dog’s bleeding paw and turns away.

Of course he’s considered it. She might be interested. And hell, he had to go and ask David, of all people, out for fondue for two. He could get sloppy drunk and call her the wrong name and they could easily never see each other again.

Yeah, if Kaz was willing to let his dick control his life again.

Kaz has got his garden fully planned. The growing season is short but he wants to make the most of it. He’s going to learn how to hunt proper, and between that and the traps and the fishing he’ll be fully self-sufficient.

He decided a long time ago that he wouldn’t just grab some dogs and run. Live on pine bark and lemmings. He’s too old for that To Build a Fire shit and has no intention of living like prey. Finding the double amputee who never takes off his sunglasses will never be hard. Even the false trails he’d set - to Hawaii, to Canada, to Argentina - won’t work for long, not against his predator.

Kaz buys more peat pots. A gallon of wolf piss concentrate. Loads the flatbed with wood, polyvinyl sheeting, and kerosene. A quick stop at the market next door for booze and foodstuffs. All paid for in the cash he’d been slowly pulling from that little fund Ocelot gave him long ago. Some signing bonus to convince him to join FOXHOUND. He told the asshole he didn’t need his money, but it comes in handy here.

The dogs are napping by the time he gets back to the truck. He walks them through town, past the post office and the bank he doesn’t need, the church with the Sunday pancake breakfasts he doesn’t go to. Down the gravel road that leads to the salmon processing plant and back to the truck. A few people nod at him. Someone asks him how he held up over the winter, someone else asks him how the old truck is doing. He’s good. It’s fine.

When he gets home he leaves all the supplies in the truck. He’ll deal with that work tomorrow. For now he chops more wood, until the sun starts to set and he finds himself getting sleepy. He isn’t used to the odd rhythms here yet.

There’s a missed call on his cell phone and only one person who has the number to it. Kaz groans. Starts up the stove and mixes a rough biscuit batter before calling his ex-wife back. He left her a voice message already, but she still wants to know if they’re going to do the usual trade-off. It was never easy splitting her time between Los Angeles and Tacoma, but Alaska is just too far. Cathy isn’t coming this summer.

“You said it yourself,” Nadine says. “It’s beautiful up there. Cathy misses you. She wants to go fishing with Daddy again.”

“What, doesn’t she have friends to spend her summer with? No one’s gonna come to her birthday party?”

“She wants to spend it with her father.”

“Thought you found some other guy.”

Nadine’s laugh is bitter and low and Kaz accepts it. Yes, he’s a horrible father.

Cathy is turning six this summer. She’ll grow up tall and gorgeous and grateful to some stepdad. Or maybe she’ll stay short. There is a lot of Kazuhira’s mother in her after all.

Nadine never needed a contact. It was a dumb thought, he’d left L.A. in a hurry and thought, for Cathy, for emergencies. Kaz crushes the cell phone in his bionic and throws it into the stove. Burning plastic always stinks, but he covers it up with whiskey. It’s just the cheap shit, the stuff that goes down too fast.

His head starts to feel warmer.

The flames dance and he closes the stove. He’s grown used to the sound of crackling flames, but.

Kaz wasn’t there, not for Outer Heaven. Kaz didn’t hear it happen.

There was no reason for the self-destruct. It was all _his_ idea. Had to have been.

He fought, of course he fought. David had barely escaped with his life. While the fortress exploded behind him. The phantom did that. Gave him that time, and died alone.

This is why he can’t drink. The phantom made his choice. Kaz will go down fighting and see, this is why he doesn’t fucking drink, because if Ocelot catches him drunk he might just lay down and let him do it. He can’t drink because he’s going to fly to L.A. for Cathy’s birthday. Crash the party, who cares -

And let Ocelot find him there and murder an entire suburban birthday party. He would do that.

Wouldn’t he?

Ocelot never believed in Solid Snake. He knew damn well what Kaz was doing and didn’t care, but David defied expectations and Kaz won. Even if Ocelot didn’t seem bothered by his presence at FOXHOUND, he never fell for the groveling either. Kaz remembers when he said they’d have to kill each other. He knows Ocelot will come when he least expects it.

Unless he sends someone else.

“Loko? Jody?”

Silence.

No one's in the cabin.

Kaz stumbles to the door gasping and - there they are. Frolicking around under the stars.

The Northern Lights are dancing, casting an eerie green glow. A cold wind sweeps from the north and Kaz falls to the steps. The dogs come to him. He buries his hands in the scruff of their neck and just breathes.

They’re awkward about sleeping in the bed with him. Working dogs are accustomed to kennels or crates, huskies like to burrow in the snow, but Kaz coaxes them until he has one lump of furry warmth at his back and another in his arms.

He sleeps easily and doesn’t dream.

In the morning there’s a large hare in one of his traps. Still alive and panting, but the trap snapped across the spine. The rear legs are paralyzed, and the dogs prance around it sniffing while the rabbit’s eyes glaze over.

Kaz snaps its neck in a wet crush. Carries it back to the cabin. Slips the off the skin and puts the whole carcass in the fridge for now. The hide he scrapes outside, flicking bits of flesh and fat to the dogs, before burying it in salt. The locals say brain is best to tan the hide, and he’ll do that later when he’s making the stew. Crack open the skull and scoop it out.

When the mess is done with Kaz washes his hands and unloads the flatbed. Looks at the wood, looks at the trees, looks at the mountains rising at the horizon.

He’ll build it tomorrow.

In the summer the meadow will fill with flowers. Maybe Ocelot will know the name of each one. Maybe Ocelot will pull off the petals as he walks past, dodging every pathetic booby trap with his usual grace. He’ll open the coldframes and smile at the practical potatoes and cabbages. Scratch the dogs behind the ears and ask them what sort of roots their master has planted here.

If Ocelot makes him wait, Kaz will start tulip bulbs in the fall. There will be a smokehouse filled with venison and dried fish on the lines. Maybe next summer, he’ll even take Cathy again. Teach her how to shoot a gun. How to skin a hare.

The locals say it’ll be a long summer. Kaz is ready for it.


End file.
